Monday, November 30, 2015

Aye, and There's The Rub.

Environmental activist, Bill McKibben, of 350.org, has written a piece for Scientific American that cuts through the chaff to reveal what any hope of forestalling runaway climate change is going to mean. It's all in this paragraph:

...researchers have made it relatively simple to understand what we can and can’t do going forward. If the planet is to hold its temperature increase to two degrees Celsius—and almost every nation agreed to that target in 2009 at the international talks in Copenhagen—then we simply have to leave most of the carbon we know about underground; it can’t be burned. In fact, a powerful article in Nature last January listed all the carbon deposits that would need to go untouched: places like the tar sands of Canada or the oil and gas reservoirs beneath the Arctic.

Wait, did he just mention Canada's very own Tar Sands? Why, yes he did. Sorry, Alberta. Sorry, Saskatchewan. That stuff has to be left in the ground. It can't keep feeding into the fossil fuel stream. It's just too carbon intensive with today's technology.

Every developed country is going to have to make some pretty big sacrifices, especially the fossil energy exporters.

In principle, jet engine on a commercial plane could be powered by liquid hydrogen. Japan has been investigating hydrogen as a green fuel for many decades and has a special research agency devoted to this topic...A..non

@ Anon 8:42 - I did that years ago. I did my traveling in my youth, back before Golden Arches began popping up on every high street. When I went back many years later I was saddened to see how so many places declined under the pressures of consumerism.

For example, I visited Stonehenge the morning after the equinox (the Druids were gone) at dawn. It was just me and the caretaker. He showed me everything there was to see. Today it's all cordoned off and visitors are kept 20 to 30-yards distant. London in the mid 60s was a far different, yes better, place than it is half a century later. You could say much the same for Toronto or so many other places.